Experimentation
Entry posted by reepblue ·
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I almost let a whole week go by without writing a blog, ahh! I've been doing a lot of thinking and experimenting over the last few days, and talking to other people about Vectronic.
Last week, I talked about improving functionalities of the pickup system and the platforms. Although the pickup system is near done, the platform system, well they need work. I made a topic about them here, and kind of left me on a stand still on the project because I see them as a vital piece of the game, and they need to be perfect 100% of the time.
As I mentioned before Vectronic always seemed to feel and play like a demo. there was never more than 3 maps, and the ideas were very basic. The method of slopping out maps quickly, and fine tuning them later is fixing that as there are way more maps than ever, but unfortunately I'm noticing a problem with the actual core gameplay itself, something I would never notice with just a few demo maps.
It seems as though although the box has cool effects attached to them, they mostly need environment elements to really make them shine; which is a problem. The question is, is it the powers attached to the balls, or is it that the balls can only activate the boxes. And if the balls can activate other elements, how would they work, and what problems would it solve? I went back to the project what Vectronic morphed out of to see if those ideas can fix problems that Vectronic has.
In the old project, the power was tied to each box, and the player would fire electric bolts at them to activate or deactivate them. I had a cube that reversed it's gravity, (Along with other cubes because I didn't know how to make it so only THAT cube flipped) one that stayed static in the air, a cube that exploded, and a cube that did nothing at all. This method had problems, which I talked about here.
The idea of the flip cube was something I really loved, but I couldn't figure out how to only make that one cube reverse gravity while the others remained normal. Out of curiosity, I decided to quickly script this cube and simply have it flip when the F key was pressed. I got the effect I wanted, but it's not flawless. what I did was when the cube was told to flip, it would use a joint to go to the ceiling. You can ride it up, but the player would clip through the ceiling which I think I can fix on the player side, and you can't pick up a box when the box wants to go up; but again I think I can fix that.I also have ideas on how to make the ghost cube more fun and interesting.
But then comes the question is this really a problem, or is it just me working on an idea as a demo for such a long time that I find it boring? I'm asking a lot of people for input and one person plans on give me a playable prototype of his idea so I'm looking forward to that. I want Vectronic to be the best it can be, and if it ends up being different than the demo or what it ever was, but a lot more fun, so be it.
Besides gameplay, I've also been playing with tolua++, and getting ideas what I wish to do with LEX in the future. There is also the Halloween Game Tournament so maybe my head will clear up when I'm working on that. There have also been some experimentation on art, but I'm not ready to talk about that yet.
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